performingartsincornwall

  Julien van Mallaerts and Tim Dean gave a highly entertaining and beautifully crafted song recital at the Chapel Street Methodist Chapel series in Penzance on 29th May 2022. An enthusiastic audience gathered to hear a programme of English song including well known settings by Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams on Sunday afternoon as part of the Piano Go Round series of concerts. So much of the enjoyment in a song recital is to be had from the presence and drive of the performers and right from the opening thrills and whistles of Britten's Plough Boy and Oliver Cromwell contrasted with Sally Gardens, the audience was riveted with a presentation that was always entertaining.. This is a rich voice but also very subtle with wonderful diction and superb pianissimo, bringing to the performance of well known folk song repertoire a freshness which sparked interest which kept us on the edge of our chairs wanting more of the superb top range...but never overblown. Julien had just

Ruth Wall gives recital on four harps in Gerrans Parish Hall, accompanied by Graham Fitkin. There were over 100 strings in total requiring careful tuning before, and during the concert which ace harpist Ruth Wall gave on Friday 9 th December at Gerrans Memorial Hall. Ruth’s  programme took as its broad theme Migration and she chose a remarkable variety of strands to captivate the audience – the programme was both highly creative and a spur to the imagination. There were four distinctive harps she played, the traditional clearsach, the bray harp, electro-acoustic harp, and a lever harp. While Ruth Wall lives in Cornwall she  has mined the stories and music from her native Sutherland, and in particular the Highland clearances for the thread that she wove through this programme.    Her partner the composer, Graham Fitkin who was accompanying her adapted tunes from bagpipe music books and these were then  interwoven with looping techniques to create new sound worlds.  For example a record